Easier AutoUpdating for Open-Source Apps

Today we're releasing a free, open-source, hosted
updates webservice and companion
npm package
to enable easy automatic updates for open-source Electron apps. This is a step
toward empowering app developers to think less about
deployment and more about developing high-quality experiences for their users.

Electron has an autoUpdater API that gives apps the ability to
consume metadata from a remote endpoint to check for updates, download them
in the background, and install them automatically.

Enabling these updates has been a cumbersome step in the deployment process
for many Electron app developers because it requires a web server to be deployed
and maintained just to serve app version history metadata.

Today we are announcing a new drop-in solution for automatic app updates.
If your Electron app is in a public GitHub repository and you're using
GitHub Releases to publish builds, you can use this service to deliver
continuous app updates to your users.

That's it! The module will check for updates at app startup, then
every ten minutes. When an update is found it will download automically
in the background, and a dialog will be displayed when the update is ready.

If your app is private, you may need to run your own update server. There are
a number of open-source tools for this, including Zeit's Hazel and
Atlassian's Nucleus. See the Deploying an Update Server tutorial for more
info.

Thanks to Julian Gruber for helping design and build this simple and scalable
web service. Thanks to the folks at Zeit for their open-source Hazel
service, from which we drew design inspiration. Thanks to Samuel Attard for
the code reviews. Thanks to the Electron community for helping test this
service.